Hardware errors in a microprocessor may arise from numerous sources, such as cosmic ray strikes, over-temperature hot spots, supply voltage spikes, and many other sources. These hardware errors may propagate into the processor, platform, and software, causing data corruption which has the potential to bring down the system, lead to errant system behavior, or cause silent data corruption. To increase reliability and availability, many microprocessor systems may implement error detection, error containment, error correction, and error recovery schemes. Several of these functions may be performed in the hardware or in system firmware. However, in some circumstances the operating system software or application software may need to receive error messages from hardware and act upon them using an error handler module.
The error handler module provides a challenge during the design and debug of the module itself. It may not be possible to adequately test its function without providing it with actual hardware errors. This may be performed at the microprocessor manufacturer's facility using specialized and costly hardware tools and instrumentation for injecting hardware errors at will. This may be extremely difficult to do at an operating system software vendor's facility or at an application software vendor's facility. They may not wish to obtain specialized and costly hardware which may be useful only for a limited set of processor revisions, nor may they have the trained personnel to operate it.
In some processor embodiments, there may be an error injection interface which would permit the injection of certain errors at will. However, these interfaces may vary between processor revision levels and therefore require extensive re-coding of any software for the control of the error injection. Again, this many not be a practical approach for the operating system software vendors or application software vendors.